A short story inspired by a recent experience. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to meet someone new, and I felt that if I wrote about it, it would help me remember:

A Beautiful Storm

A cloud appears in the sky, and then another. These beautiful clouds begin to interact in a great blue expanse. Each rain drop in these clouds is a conversation, a thought, or an idea that may be shared and understood as the clouds become nearer to each other. Occasionally, one cloud will meet another, and their rain drops of “understanding” may coalesce. The clouds may drift apart and come together many times throughout their life, but they realize that despite their distance, they are simply inseparable manifestations of a single weather system.

I have seen these clouds before, and I know where they could go. They could choose to remain at a distance, traveling separately and uneventfully to dissipate in their own time. Or they could journey together in such a way that they will build upon one another, accompanying each other until the storm. I am okay with either, simply because we are only clouds, and clouds owe each other nothing. I am okay either because neither one of us could ever hope to control the weather. I am only one strange cloud in this complicated front of social responsibility that we have all been forced into by the weather. In the end, no one person can possibly hope to know every cloud in the sky.